The Hottest Indian Startups of 2014 in the Not-So-Sexy Enterprise Space

Enterprise-focused startups have emerged as some of tech’s hotbeds of innovation.

While the enterprise space is not considered as glamorous or sexy as their counterparts in the consumer space which receive tremendous amounts of publicity and media coverage, VCs are still tripping over themselves to fund enterprise startups. 2015 promises to be another hot year for startups creating tech for businesses rather than consumers.

In this list we highlight some of the hottest enterprise startups of 2014 that we think have the potential to become the next big thing. Note that all startups in this list have launched in or after 2012 only.

Silverpush

SilverPush is a target advertising startup which uses its mobile app product and helps business owners who experience from post-download dormancy & abandoned transactions. They aggregate and analyse multiple sources of data, such as app usage, location, social graph and search history and identify the most lucrative opportunities to deliver targeted advertisements. They claim to hear “ultrasonic inaudible voices” which helps them recognize the user and provide a specific advertisement.

Industry: Ad Targeting Software

City: Mountain View, CA

Funding: $100k from GSF Accelerator and 500 Startups; and $1.5 Mn from IDG Ventures and Unilazer Ventures.

Founders: Hitesh Chawla, Alex Modon, Mudit Seth

Founded In: 2012

Frrole

Data is the new gold and the ways in which world collects data and how it can be used to draw inferences has evolved tremendously. Frrole is one such  big data startup which specializes in Twitter-based analytics.The startup analyses over 10 million tweets daily and has sifted through over 100 million tweets since January this year. It charges about $100 per month per data stream. Frrole provides insights about users and are categorized under different sections like events, sports, deals etc. and creates a social newspaper for a particular city.

Industry: Social Media, Big Data

City: Bangalore

Funding: $245K in Angel Round in April 2014 from Sharad Sharma, Rajan Anandan and Manav Garg.

Founders: Abhishek Vaid, Amarpreet Kalkat, Nishith Sharma

Founded In: 2012

Voxapp

VoxApp platform enables brands and research companies to undertake consumer feedback for market research on brand awareness, ad recall, etc on the mobile phone. It charges a fee from research companies for completed research samples. Voxapp aims to resolve key problems such as inaccuracy in human collection of responses, turnaround time for nationwide data collection and enhancing access to the affluent audiences which can only found in offices and are out of bounds of field surveyor.

Industry: Big Data Analytics

City: New Delhi

Funding: Blume Ventures and Palaash Ventures, and angel investors including Sachin Bhatia, co-founder at MakeMyTrip; Sidharth Rao, CEO and co-founder at Webchutney among others.

Founders: Ritesh Kadmawala, Madhu Sudhan

Founded In: 2013

Tookitaki

Tookitaki aims to build the world’s largest audience predicting engine which helps marketer understand their audience behaviour at any moment. They have a three step technology which is build on the motive to deliver the same in real time. These are namely, Listen which queries unstructured data across web to identify viral and engaging information, Understand which uses semantic mapping to provide inferences about audience’s engagement, Recommend which provides actionable audience insight based on identified content.

Industry: Social Media Advertising

City: Kolkata

Funding: $25K in Seed Round from Ravi Trivedi, Miten Sampat and Anand Ladsariya. $200K in Seed Round from Nihal Mehta,Rahul Garg and more. $200K in Seed Round from Blume Ventures. $1Mn in Seed Round from Blume Ventures, Rebright Ventures and Jungle Ventures.

Founders: Abhishek Chatterjee, Jeeta Bandopadhyay

Founded In: 2012

HackerEarth

The hunt for talent has taken a turn to India. It’s no longer about Silicon Valley, India has multinationals and a booming startup ecosystem which require engineers(read: programmers). HackerEarth is looking to make the process of fathoming a person’s talent easier by programming challenges. They either design ‘challenges’ on their own based on skills like front-end development or hire someone to design them. The whole process is to create a profile, enter into a challenge, get an offer and get hired. It filters out best from the rest.

Industry: Software

City: Bangalore

Funding: $500k from Angelprime and GSF SuperAngels

Founders: Sachin Gupta, Vivek Prakash

Founded In: 2012

Zapstitch

Zapstitch is a “Cloud Data Integration” platform that seamlessly integrates data between various cloud apps like shopify, Quickbooks etc. It does away with the need of manual accounting thus avoiding chances of any human error which in turn provides greater efficiency. It automates the entire copy-paste manual data transfer process for SMEs and enterprises. It acts mediator between various SaaS applications and a company can connect this to multiple apps, define the data that it wants to sync and schedule the same. Zapstitch gets this data from the source apps and then automates it from one SaaS app to another.

Industry: Web Tools and Apps

City: Bangalore

Funding: $100K in Seed Round and an undisclosed amount in Venture Round from Anupam Mittal and others.

Founders: Satya Padmanabham, Ravi Madabhushi

Founded In: 2013

ShieldSquare

ShieldSquare is a SaaS-based solution that uses a combination of behaviour pattern analysis, device and network profiling to detect and protect online businesses against web scraping and malware attacks by competitors and unauthorised third parties, thereby increasing revenues, improving site performance and enhancing customer experience. The product analyses millions of traffic requests daily and uses Big Data analytics to identify and help block suspicious, unwanted and abusive behaviour.

Industry: Information Security

City: Bangalore

Funding: $350K in Angel Funding from Samir Sood, Pallav Nadhani and more

Founders: Rakesh Thatha, Vasanth Kumar, Pravan Thatha, Jyoti Kakatkar, Srikanth Konijeti

Founded In: 2013

LimeTray

People no longer like to wait for their reservations by standing in queues or making a reservation on phone as it can take upto minutes whereas online reservation provides you the same within seconds. LimeTray is such a startup which helps restaurants market, engage and sell to more customer online. The startups recognizes that restaurants shut down due to lack of reach to enough customers. It provides services like online reservations, content aggregation, business listing and social media marketing without having to do a single line of code.

Industry: Business Development, Internet Marketing and Local Business

City: New Delhi

Funding: Undisclosed amount in Series A round on 1 October 2014 by Matrix partners India

Founders: Piyush Jain, Akhilesh Bali

Founded In: 2013

Piquor

Piquor Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has a flagship product “Piquor Booth” which is a touch screen kiosk that enables clicking high quality digital pictures and sending them instantly through email. It bridges the gap between outdoor media and online marketing such that a company’s “key message” is interactively delivered & spreads virally and effortlessly through social networks. Piquor has tied up with brands in Gurgaon and Bangalore and the booths have registered more 2,00,000 unique interactions. More than 80,000 people have shared the photos on Facebook.

Industry: Marketing and Advertising

City: Gurgaon

Funding: $50,000 seed funding each in January 2013 and October 2014

Founders: Pranjal Prashar, Vineet Chauhan and Arpit Gupta

Founded In: 2011

GreedyGame

Free and addictive games are a boon and ads disrupting the same are a bane.GreedyGame aims at enabling branding on mobile games grab highest engagement time of the consumers and also enables advertisers looking to tap this potential. They deliver dynamic and native ads which vary on the basis of location and time the game is played. It helps brands get a channel to reach out to potential audience on mobile devices through the most engaging medium and gamers enjoy the games without any interference in game play. All in all win-win.

Industry: Mobile Advertising

City: New Delhi

Funding: Funded by TLabs

Founders: Arpit Jain, Arink Verma

Founded In: 2013

Wizrocket

WizRocket is a startup which provides with user behavior analysis and is a targeting tool that helps every size of web businesses interact with their users across offline and online mediums. It can reach out to customers via web messaging, push notifications, in-app messaging, SMS or Email. They let websites discover the who, what and why on their own websites and mobile apps and then apply behavior targeting to improve retention, engagement and conversion rates.

Industry: Consumer Behaviour and Business Analytics

City: Palo Alto, CA

Funding: $1.6 Mn in Venture Funding on 7 July 2014 by Accel Partners.

Founders: Anand Jain, Sunil Thomas, Suresh Kondamudi

Founded In: 2013

Kartrocket

Ecommerce has turned taller than Burj Khalifa, metaphorically. After giving cutthroat competition to brick & mortar shops, these offline sellers have found a boon. SMEs can now open their own ecommerce website and to do so Kartrocket works for them. It is a provider of DIY ecommerce platform. Kartrocket provides storefront designs, domestic as well as international payment options integrated with logistics. It helps these SMEs sell across mobile and web devices. The platform is already integrated with eBay, Amazon and Snapdeal to allow multi-channel sales.

Industry: SaaS

City: New Delhi

Funding: Undisclosed amount in Angel funding on 23 July 2013 from 5ideas and 500 Startups, $2 Mn in Series A Round on 21 October 2014 from Nirvana Venture Advisors, 500 Startups and others.

Founders: Sahil Goel, Gautam Kapoor

Founded In: 2012

Nowfloats

NowFloats is a startups which helps Small and Medium Businesses to ‘float’ online i.e help those business in providing an online existence. The most common and familiar method of SMS is used to update the website and same can be delivered to customers of the business. Also, its algorithm ensures highest discoverability through intelligent Search Engine Optimization(SEO).

The startup recognizes the need of providing Indian Businesses some sort of online identity and thus makes it easier for them to do so with the easiest way.They claim that SMEs can create a website in 13 minutes with just four text messages.

Industry: Location Based Services

City: Hyderabad

Funding: Undisclosed Amount in First round of funding in August 2013 from Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures

Founders: Jasminder Singh Gulati, Nitin Jain, Ronak Kumar, Neeraj Sabharwal

Founded In: 2012

Altizon

No matter how skilled humans get, they can still be erroneous. To get ahead of this Altizon systems has developed a family of sensor data appliances and SDKs that drive data from sensors in Industrial Equipment to their flagship Datonis platform. The platform provides a device cloud and performs large-scale data ingestion. The company claims that their platform can handle a billion events a day from a million devices. It can be used for Industrial, Health, Consumer Electronics and Retail pruposes.

Industry: Software

City: Pune

Funding: Undisclosed amount in Seed Funding on 17 September 2014

Founders: Vinay Nathan, Ranjit Nair, Yogesh Kulkarni

Founded In: 2013

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This is part of our special series, In Focus: 2014 In Review, in which we showcase the highlights of 2014 and what’s to come next year in the Indian Tech Ecosystem. Stay tuned for more.

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